Marketing Land: Not Who, But What, Is Driving Google?

With the depth of attention given to Google’s broken promises lately, the natural-language-processing, sometimes-sponsored-content-identifying engine clearly has some ‘splaining to do.

For those of you who haven’t read Danny Sullivan’s excellent piece from a few weeks ago, let me elaborate on those broken promises.

Google at one time decried paid inclusion — but then, in 2012, it turned its once-organic shopping search engine into a pay-to-play ad product. More recently, in 2013, it went back on a promise to never display banner ads on search results pages, delivering giant images on behalf of brands like Nike, Virgin America and Under Armour.